Crooked Heart Page 4

  “No, that’s right. Elton was my uncle, he left the firm to me. And to Carolyn.”

  “Oh, I see. I was saying, would it be usual for Mr. Stanley to be out this late on his own, with his wife out of town?”

  “Christ, I don’t know, does it matter?”

  “Maybe not. What about suitcases?”

  “Suitcases?” George repeated as if he’d never heard the word.

  “Well, since you’ve been so thorough,” Tom said sweetly, “I thought you might have checked to see if any of her suitcases are gone.”

  George flung out his hands, as if beseeching God to grant him the patience he had no real desire for, and said, “Why the hell should she take a suitcase? She wasn’t going anywhere!”

  “Well, we don’t know that, do we?” asked Tom with gentle malice.

  Frostily George responded, “I know my wife, and I know what she would do and what she wouldn’t do, and I can assure you, mister, that she did not pack a suitcase and leave town without telling me. She wouldn’t do it.”

  Tom, obscurely pleased to have exposed Kimbrough’s simmering hostility, uncharacteristically went on to expose more of it. “They might not necessarily have left town,” he suggested.

  “They?” George repeated blankly.

  “Whoever she went with.”

  Rossi turned to stare at the Chief in astonishment. Holder himself was amazed at what he heard himself doing; he didn’t think he had ever deliberately tried to alienate a witness.

  He had certainly succeeded. All pretense of courtesy gone, George Kimbrough leaned forward in his chair and shook his finger furiously at his tormentor. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to nasty insinuations about my wife! I’ll have you reported to your superior officer!”

  Tom realized he was enjoying himself. “Two things, Mr. Kimbrough,” he said with unruffled calm. “One, I’m not making nasty insinuations, I’m just a cop doing his job, and that means considering all the possibilities. Two, I am the superior officer. If you want to report me, you’ll have to do it to the mayor. Now, why don’t you just show me where Mrs. Kimbrough keeps her suitcases, and prove to me you’re right? That’s if you think you can tell if any of them are missing.”

  Later Holder would wonder what on earth had made him so cocksure Grace Kimbrough had run away from her husband; he had absolutely nothing to support that assumption except his own rapidly formed opinion that George Kimbrough was a husband well worth running away from. Later still he would recognize that what had prompted him to jump to this conclusion was the phenomenon psychologists call projection: He had “projected” onto Grace Kimbrough his own marital misery. And that, of course, was why he had baited George; he was punishing the man on Grace’s behalf.

  “I can tell you exactly how many suitcases she has,” George was saying belligerently, “and I can tell you with absolute certainty if any of them are missing.” At this point he was out of his chair and heading for the stairs, Holder hard on his heels, Rossi plodding along behind. “I gave her a new set of luggage for her birthday, seven bags, the whole damn set, every kind they made in that style; small, medium, large, carry-on, collapsible, dress bag, even a train case, for Christ’s sake, and who uses train cases anymore?” By this time they were in the upstairs hallway. “There,” George said, flinging open the door of a walk-in closet. “Count ’em.”

  Holder counted them: seven brand-new brown tweed bags with leather straps. His heart sank. He had really, badly, wanted this woman to be a runaway from a dreadful marriage. His quick sympathy for her, he now discovered to his dismay, had progressed to affection.

  Doggedly, he tried to find a loophole in the conclusion that was drawing itself in his mind. “She might have taken one of her old ones.”

  “Gave them to Goodwill,” proclaimed George with the air of one preening himself.

  “She might have taken one of yours.”

  George rolled his eyes heavenward and then directed Holder’s attention to the other side of the closet, where there was a matched set of five black leather bags.

  “All there,” Holder said without sufficient optimism even to make it a question.

  “All there,” George crooned.

  “You realize, don’t you, Mr. Kimbrough,” said Tom grimly, “that if one or two of these bags was missing, then we could almost have assumed that your wife hadn’t come to any harm, because we’d know that she left of her own free will.”

  George stared at him, and in that instant Holder saw him wonder if his wife was all right. But only for that instant. Then Kimbrough once again assumed the air of one who is inconsiderately used by others due to no fault of his own. “Of course she left of her own free will,” he snapped. “She just didn’t pack a suitcase to do it, that’s all.” Then suddenly it seemed as if Kimbrough, having endured all the pressure he could, suddenly broke. He burst out in furious bewilderment, not at Holder but at the world in general, “Where the goddamn hell is she?”

  “Mr. Kimbrough,” said Tom with a sigh, “we’ll do our best to find out.”

  CHAPTER 6

  As the Chief of Police put the machinery of investigation into motion, he refrained from informing George Kimbrough that Grace would not be considered officially missing until she’d been gone considerably longer than eight hours. If George got the idea he was getting special treatment, he might feel mollified. Tom preferred to leave him mad as a hornet.

  Holder had phoned the station and set one of the junior officers onto the cab companies. He left Rossi to extract from George the names of all the people he’d called when looking for Grace; they would have to be called again. After all, it was quite possible that a friend of Grace’s might have conspired with her to keep George ignorant of her whereabouts. The friend might lie to George but tell the truth once the police were involved. That was assuming Grace had run away, of course, which Holder no longer believed. As rapidly as he had formed the opinion that Grace had left her husband simply because her husband was eminently leavable, he had abandoned it. He had looked at all that beautiful new luggage sitting there untouched, and he had thought, She’s dead. And the thought had filled him with aching melancholy.

  This situation was something new to Tom. Not that he didn’t regularly form impossible attachments. But the women he fell in love with—about one a year—were always “impossible” simply because they were married (as, of course, was he). But this one, he told himself with scathing contempt, this one wasn’t just married, she was dead. Way to go, Holder, he thought. Don’t you think your fantasy life is getting a bit out of hand?

  That fantasy life was his chief survival mechanism, and he knew it. He had always been careful about it, always kept to the rules that made it safe: only women at church, never women at work (so as not to get distracted). Only women who were roughly in his league in terms of age and general attractiveness. Only women who were securely married. And never, never, never let the woman suspect that anything improper was going on in his mind. Well, he was keeping that last rule, at least, as far as Grace Kimbrough was concerned.

  But he needed to get hold of himself and stop romanticizing her. She was not his kindred soul inspiring him with the nerve to break out of an unhappy marriage. For all he knew, she might even love that S.O.B. she was married to, even if he was so stuck on himself that his first and last reaction to his wife’s disappearance was to be mad at her for putting him to all this inconvenience. Women loved the damnedest men. And if she was dead, well, then, she was a homicide victim and he should get along with his job without getting all maudlin about it.

  He needed to ask around to find out when she had last been seen. The neighbors on one side, the Stanleys, or at least the male Stanley, would have to wait, but it was after ten-thirty and the guy had to come home sometime. Unless, of course, he had run away with Grace! Hey, now, that was a thought. Despite himself, Tom felt a little spurt of hope.

  He stood for a moment on the Kimbroughs’ front porch, appreciating the night. He love
d the dark. (In fact, he loved it because it is the place where the imagination is most free, but he didn’t know that.) It had stopped raining, and the weather seemed a bit milder now that it wasn’t hitting his face in drops. He took in a lungful of cool, damp air and looked around.

  The Kimbroughs had a corner lot; their driveway ran onto the side street, and a streetlamp stood where the roads met. It illuminated the asphalt, wet and empty, but not much light filtered through into people’s front yards because there were too many trees and shrubs. The deciduous trees, of course, were bare, but there were multitudes of evergreens. The houses were nestled in layers of dark vegetation, separated from one another by high, thick hedges. Even if Grace Kimbrough had disappeared in daylight, it was going to be difficult to find anyone who had actually seen anything.

  On his right, across the side street, lived the Heseltines, Franklin and Mabel. Inquiries there revealed that they had been gone for most of the day and glued to the tube for most of the evening, and they were sorry, but they hadn’t seen Grace Kimbrough recently. Similar tidings greeted him at the Forrester residence directly across the street from the Kimbroughs. It was at the house next door to the Forresters, directly across the street from the Stanleys, that Tom got the first break.

  He had taken one of the uniforms, Roscoe “Rocko” Pursley, along with him, so that people would be less skittish about opening their doors to a strange man at this hour of the night. But it was he who did the talking, of course, and it was therefore he who caught the brunt of the attention of Gloria Simmons.

  She opened the door so promptly upon his ring that he suspected she must have been watching their approach, yet she affected surprise. The po-leece? Why, whatever could be the matter? She was wrapped in a lilac satin robe that might have been more becoming to her when her hair was its natural color and her breasts were at their original height. She was at the age that the writer of Auntie Mame once described as being “somewhere between forty and death,” and any fool could see she wasn’t going to go gentle into that good night. She offered Holder a handshake that was meant to be feminine but struck him as unpleasantly limp, and presented him with her name as though it were a personal gift.

  She insisted they come in and sit down, which they did, in a room full of faded femininity and stale cigarette smoke. Ashtrays, all of them dirty and most of them full, cluttered every one of the little tables that flanked the sofas and chairs. Everything that was upholstered was pink. The lady of the house draped herself with elaborate sensuality across a white and gold liquor cabinet and simpered about not offering them drinks because she just knew they were on duty, weren’t they? And what on earth could she do to, ah, assist them? At the word assist, she had aimed a look at Holder that somehow gave to that innocuous verb a heretofore unappreciated sexual connotation. Holder sighed internally. This was going to be tedious.

  She was well named, he thought. She was a Gloria kind of person. Which made sense, he supposed. Presumably the mother who named her had also reared her to be this way. He tore his attention away from these ruminations and told her why they were there.

  She bestowed on him what was obviously supposed to be a worldly smile. “Well, it just so happens I can help you with that,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am?” Holder replied in his flattest voice.

  With immense satisfaction she cooed, “I saw her this afternoon.”

  “What time was that, ma’am?”

  “Oh, dear, I just knew you were going to ask me that, and isn’t it silly? It’s slipped my mind.”

  Oh God, she was going to make him wring it out of her bit by bit. “Well then, ma’am, could you say approximately what time it might have been?”

  Gloria gave him a hurt look, lit a cigarette, and sucked the first lungful of smoke out of it. “Well, I’m sure I could remember, if you could just be patient with me.” The hurt look gave way to a quavering smile that was intended to convey something along the lines of “poor little me.”

  Holder considered a moment. “Tell you what, Ms. Simmons—” He broke off as though dissatisfied with what he’d said, and then produced a tiny, conspiratorial smile. “Or may I . . .” He hesitated. “May I call you Gloria?”

  “Why, certainly, Officer,” she purred, unwittingly reducing Harton’s Police Chief to the status of flatfoot.

  Holder turned his smile up to match the magnitude of hers and continued. “Let’s pretend it’s a game, like on one of those game shows on TV. Let’s pretend I know the answer, and if you can guess it correctly, you get dinner for two at Leboeuf’s with the, ah, gentleman of your choice.” This last phrase was said with such significance that Pursley regarded his Chief with awe.

  It worked.

  “That sounds very nice. I think I’m going to like this game.”

  “All right, then, Gloria Simmons”—Holder manufactured a twinkle, put it in his eye, and leaned forward in his chair—“are you ready for the question?”

  “I’m ready,” she assured him, also leaning forward, and exhaling smoke in Tom’s face.

  With difficulty he stopped himself from recoiling and asked, “At what time did you see Grace Kimbrough this afternoon?”

  She puckered her face in concentration, then smiled in triumph and announced, “Just after lunch!”

  “Very good, Gloria Simmons!” Tom was grateful that the part called for a broad smile at this point, because he certainly could not have done this any longer with a straight face. “And what time is just after lunch?”

  Gloria closed her eyes and drew languorously on her cigarette in a manner she clearly fancied seductive. After a pause so pregnant it was a wonder water didn’t break, her eyes reopened and focused on him like rifle sights in mascara. “I looked at my watch,” she uttered. “It was exactly seven minutes after one.”

  “Fantastic!” Tom shouted. “Gloria, that was the right answer! And now for the grand prize—”

  “What’s the grand prize?”

  Holder looked her in the eye and said deliberately and with great meaning, “Anything you want.”

  “Oh, good!”

  “Where did you see Grace Kimbrough, what was she doing, and what did she say?”

  “Well, she didn’t say anything, I just saw her.”

  “And where was she?”

  “Coming out of her house and going into the house just across from here, which belongs to the Stanleys.”

  “She went into the Stanleys’ house?” Tom had unintentionally fallen out of character and back into Efficient Policeman.

  Gloria pouted a bit at Holder’s desertion, and sought to recapture his manly attention by being useful. “Well, she’s always going into their house, you know, just constantly, I mean a person can’t help noticing a thing like that, and drawing her own conclusions.” Being useful seemed to work, for there was no denying that the policeman was glad to hear this.

  “Oh, Gloria,” he breathed, “you don’t know how helpful this is.” A strangled sound emanated from Pursley, and Holder, under the guise of uncrossing and recrossing his legs, managed to kick Pursley quite painfully on the ankle.

  Gloria was gushing, “Oh, I’m so glad I can be helpful to you. I mean, of course I wouldn’t say anything to anybody else, because I’m just not a person who gossips, that’s just not the way I am, but I mean you have to know these things, don’t you? Because you’re the police.”

  Holder assured her earnestly, and even honestly, that this was an attitude he didn’t always meet, and he was glad to have found a citizen so willing to share her knowledge. After that his compliments became less honest but no less effective, as Gloria worked her way through two cigarettes and her meager store of knowledge. As facts go, it was nothing to write home about; she was convinced that Grace Kimbrough and Bill Stanley had been “carrying on,” but of course she could offer no proof for her convictions; it was just obvious from “the way they were together.” Did she see them frequently? Not really, not very often, but it had been going on for years and ev
erybody knew, of course, except the spouses, who were always the last to find out these things, weren’t they? And it was a complete mystery to Gloria why the thing had started in the first place, because why Grace could be interested in such a dumpy little man as Bill Stanley when she was married to a fabulous man, really, so handsome and charming, Gloria just didn’t know.

  As far as Grace’s movements on that day were concerned, Gloria had seen her come out her own front door, cross her yard to the Stanleys’ house, and, Gloria was pretty sure, let herself in with a key. Unless the door was unlocked. Anyway, Grace had certainly not rung the bell and waited to be let in. She had just walked right up and gone in. This had happened just after one o’clock, exactly at one-oh-seven. Had Bill Stanley been there at the time? Gloria couldn’t say, really, although she could make a good guess. How about Mrs. Stanley? Gloria couldn’t say that either, and on that question no guesses were forthcoming.

  It wasn’t much, but it was highly suggestive. Of course, what it was suggesting was precisely the thing Tom Holder wanted very badly to believe: Grace had bolted with her lover, who was the guy next door, whose wife was conveniently out of the way on a plane to California. Of course there were some serious problems with that theory. To consider those problems, Holder needed to extricate Pursley and himself from the web of Gloria Simmons, and he did so, not without difficulty.

  She made her last play at the front door, laying an insinuating hand on the sleeve of his coat, saying, “You’re a very distinguished-looking man, you know; nobody would ever guess you were a policeman.”

  It was clear that she meant this as a compliment, which confirmed Holder’s opinion of her intelligence—or lack thereof. He couldn’t stand stupid women. A brief vision of Kathryn Koerney flickered across his mind.

  As Gloria’s front door closed behind them, Holder and Pursley went back down the walk, Holder murmuring gently to Pursley, “If you ever, and I mean ever, tell any of that to anybody, I will personally bust your ass so bad, you’ll be singing soprano in the nearest church choir.”